WMRA's October Books & Brews features Earl Swift, author of Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail.
Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026 at 7pm.
Live at Pale Fire Brewing Company in Harrisonburg, and available later on WMRA's Youtube Channel.
Signed copies of Up on Cove Mountain will be available at the event and online at Stone Soup Books.
WMRA's Books & Brews is made possible thanks to our series sponsor, Gaines Group Architects. The Gaines Group has offices in Charlottesville and Harrisonburg.
About the Book
Five million steps. Twenty-two hundred miles. A five-month, bucket-list adventure on America's most storied footpath--followed by a second hike decades later to sort out what went so terribly wrong. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a haunting tale of danger, destiny, and blind luck in the wilds, and of two hikers who did not survive the journey.
In 1990, a youthful Earl Swift backpacked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, a transformative experience that colored every aspect of his later life. He emerged from his hike across the rugged, sky-high roof of fourteen eastern states a sharper and more organized thinker, a better problem-solver, and a committed outdoorsman.
He also left the AT with baggage: Early in his odyssey, he spent time with a couple of other southbounders, friendly and capable and doing everything right, who were nonetheless murdered weeks later at a mountaintop campsite in Pennsylvania—a fit of violence the killer never explained.
Half a lifetime later, Swift returned to the trail to find out whether he was still, in his sixties, equal to the AT’s roller-coaster terrain. Driving him, too, was a quest for answers that had nagged at him since that first hike: What had happened at that campsite to turn two smart, bighearted people into prey? Why had fate chosen them, when other hikers—Swift included—seemed more likely candidates? And how could such a grisly episode have unfolded in the backcountry’s sylvan loveliness, not to mention one of the safest places around?
The result is an arresting account of Swift’s 2024 trek through the AT’s enduring wonders and the ghosts of its past, a chronicle of swashbuckling adventure coupled with a meditation on the nature of risk and the risks of nature.
About the Author
Earl Swift is the author of the New York Times bestseller Chesapeake Requiem, which was named to ten best-of-the-year lists. His other books include Hell Put To Shame, Across the Airless Wilds, Auto Biography, The Big Roads, and Where They Lay. A former reporter for the Virginian-Pilot and a contributor to Outside and other publications, he is a fellow of Virginia Humanities at the University of Virginia. He lives in the Blue Ridge mountains west of Charlottesville.